San Jose police today announced the arrest of two men in connection with a fatal shooting Thursday that happened just a block away from last week's deadly mass shooting at a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority maintenance facility.
Eric Zarate, 43, and Michael Herrera, 34, were arrested for the shooting reported at 1:50 p.m. Thursday in the area of North San Pedro and West Hedding streets near the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office.
Officers saw a disturbance in the area and found a man suffering from at least one gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead at the scene and was identified by the Santa Clara County medical examiner's office as 20-year-old Malik Johnson.
Officers and Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies found and arrested Zarate and Herrera at the scene. The motive for the fatal shooting, the 18th homicide in San Jose in 2021, is under investigation, police said.
The fatal shooting's proximity to the Valley Transportation Authority maintenance yard, where a VTA employee on May 26 shot and killed nine of his co-workers and then himself in the deadliest mass shooting in Bay Area history, prompted a statement from state Sen. Dave Cortese of San Jose.
"With our community still reeling from last week's horrific shooting, we are experiencing shock and profound heartbreak once again," Cortese said. "This is only another indication that meaningful steps need to be made to strengthen and expand California's laws to prevent this kind of violence and I am committed to taking any action needed to safeguard our community. This can't continue to happen."
State Senator Cortese is quoted here suggesting that he cares about stopping murder, yet today in the Mercury News he writes and op-ed lamenting the excessive punishments for murderers. Go figure.
He and the Dems have also reduced penalties for gun crimes and crime in general. They support “no bail.” The lunatic DAs in LA SF want to stop enhancement charges for crimes when a gun is used or a crime is committed by organized gangs. They support early release from prisons. ANTFA and BLM burn and terrorizes our cities and don’t get prosecuted. They are demoralizing the police and reducing their budgets at a time when crime is skyrocketing. The Dems have been completely irrational about this process, unless the object is to terrify the population through the use of crime in order to get the public to give up their right to self defense and hand the government more power and increased taxes. Are criminals, crime and lawlessness becoming the unpaid and unwitting Brownshirts of the 21st century?
Or, in the alternative, are progressives and Dems just plain stupid? Perhaps they have become so obsessed with their own false rhetoric that they are willing to ignore death, mayhem and the destruction in our communities and the disruption of our way of life to further their utopian goals. Are they using race, crime and homelessness as a cudgel?
I think that the number of murders in San Jose is actually 27 year-to-date. In 2019 and 2020 San Jose recorded 15 and 25 murders respectively for the entire year. San Jose could easily experience 40 to 50 murders this year.
And don’t bother to reply with some sophomoric response about the need for additional gun laws. Most murders are committed by people who use a gun illegally. The criminals could give a rats patute about some feckless law to purchase an insurance policy for the stolen gun they carry illegally in their waistband.